A week to treat an old wound | Albert Camus

The equivocation with Albert Camus, 70 years after his visit to Buenos Aires, looks like an old injury that is resurrected. The French writer arrived on August 12, 1949 – "it seems that this unfortunate journey brings bad luck", he wrote to his friend Victoria Ocampo – determined not to give the scheduled lectures – on the freedom of Expression because the Peronist government had censored his Misunderstanding, created at the end of May at Teatro El Argentino, directed and performed by Margarita Xirgu, and also performed by Isabel Posadas and Violeta Antier. He had been warned that censorship would require the text of these lectures. The author of L & # 39; abroad He refused to avoid "a second scandal," he wrote in his speech. Travelogue. Before leaving for Chile, he met Rafael Alberti and his wife at Ocampo in San Isidro. "I know he's a communist," he notes. Finally, I explain my points of view. He approves of me But slander will do the rest and one day will separate me from this man who is and should remain a comrade. That's what we can do! We are at the age of separation. "

Albert Camus, a foreigner in Buenos Aires, which begins this Monday at 19 hours in Malba, offers a week of activities around the work of the French author, with readings, book presentations, film screenings, paintings and lectures (see separate). Among the most remarkable activities, the Borges auditorium of the National Library will be presented Tuesday Victoria Ocampo, Albert Camus. Correspondence (1946-1959), published by Sudamericana, translated by Elisa Mayorga and Juan Javier Negri, with readings by Muriel Santa Ana and Diego Manso. In A stranger in Buenos Aires, the exhibition that will open at the National Library on Friday 16 at 7:30 pm, you will see original editions, dedicated books, original correspondence, translations, magazines, adaptations, reviews and photographs. In the center of the eyes will be the manuscript of Plague (1947), which constitutes an exceptional loan from the National Library of France (BNF), guarded by Anäis Dupuy Olivier, head of the BNF's collections, thanks to the French Embbady and the Institut français, co-organizers of the watch.

Camus, in Buenos Aires, looks like "sparing distances" to Jan, the protagonist of Misunderstanding, a work that was released in 1944 in Paris, which returns incognito to a small hotel in his hometown, run by his mother and sister, who do not recognize him because they have not seen each other for years. Jan's mother and sister have the habit of stealing and killing remaining travelers. "And my old anguish attacks me again, here, like an old wound that heats up every time I move. I know his name. It's the fear of eternal loneliness, the fear that there is no answer. And who will answer in a hotel room? "Jan asks. The difference is that Camus was at Ocampo in San Isidro," a big and beautiful house, in the style of What the wind has taken"At the entrance of his Travelogue On August 13, 1949, he wrote that he was having a "good night" and had lunch with the newspaper's director. The pressAlberto Gainza Paz Last night in Buenos Aires, he had dinner with Ocampo, listened The Lucretia kidnapping Benjamin Britten and some poems by Charles Baudelaire recorded by Ocampo. "First night of real relaxation since I left. I should stay here to avoid this ongoing struggle that is exhausting me. There is peace, temporary, in this house. "

Meursault will embody the disenchantment of the world, a sort of Nietzsche nihilist "grandson". "Mom pbaded away today. Or maybe yesterday. I do not know. "The unforgettable beginning of L & # 39; abroad, his first novel of 1942, written and published during the Nazi occupation of France, produces the same emotion as that which generates the moment when the protagonist understands in Algeria – where he fires four times at the inert body of his body. an Arab – who "had destroyed the rest of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I had been happy." There is no regret in this man of "taciturn" character and " reserved "which has no escape, that he is sentenced in advance for dissent in the face of the death of his mother.And then, worse, for an absurd crime.While & # 39; He kills for some reason: the sun blinded him. "Well, I'm going to have to die," says Meursault in prison, "Before the others, it's obvious, but everyone knows that life is not worth living in. Basically, I did not know that dying at thirty or seventy was of little importance (…) Since one must die, he is clear that no matter how and when. "

Camus was then 29 years old and had arrived in Paris two years earlier, in 1940, from Algeria, where he was born on November 7, 1913, into a family of French settlers. Blackfoot (literally "black feet"). His mother, Catalina Elena Sintes, was a silent and illiterate woman who made a living by cleaning. The Catalina family being from Minorca (Spain), it is she who taught her son Spanish and Catalan. His father, Lucien Camus, worked in a winery and died during the First World War, fighting for France. He was not an unpublished author upon his arrival in Paris. I had already published the test The reverse and the right (1937), which will be reissued in France twenty years later. In this first novel that consecrates him so young – unlike those who proclaim that the best is written at maturity – the "Camusian" is condensed, which according to Bernard-Henri Levy was a practical Kantianism. "Mistrust, gratitude and skepticism", and one could add that he suffers fortunately from the extreme sense of the tragic. There is no other certainty that death and the existence of God are unimportant compared to "the hair of a woman".

Against totalitarianism

Very early in writing and in rebellion, libertarian spirit contrary to all dogmatisms – Christianity and Marxism at the head – his existential maximum postulated that the literature "does not serve those who make the history but those who suffer it ". Camus collaborated on fight, the newspaper of the Resistance against the Third Reich, quoted by Charles de Gaulle as an example of "unbearable" journalism. In 1939 he published in The Republican Evening an article-manifest with the commandments to guide the action of journalists in wartime. In this context defended the right of every citizen to "rise above the collective to build his own freedom" and established the four columns of good journalism: lucidity, disobedience, irony and stubbornness; the pillars with which he would build his narrative, dramatic and experimental work. The myth of Sisyphus, published in 1942, the same year as L & # 39; abroad, is a literary essay in which he exposes his theory of the absurd, the recognition of the inconsistency of man in the face of the cosmos, his fate, his history. After the war I would go out Plague (1947), an allegory on Nazism placing him in a region too protagonic and pungent as an intellectual. The French writer would soon tire of his postwar role and the "disgusting seriousness" of those years.

The camaraderie with Jean-Paul Sartre – whom he met in 1943 during the creation of Flies– broke down dramatically. "Camus, the bourgeois" is disqualified by the stern father of French existentialism. The trigger for the break was the departure of The rebellious man (1951), the book where Camus rejects the totalitarianisms of the century, including the Soviet Union. "The end does not justify the means" for the author of the play The fair (1949), which was in the air of socialism of the time. Any criticism of Stalin and his crimes was an unforgivable "bourgeois deviation". The author's option of denouncing the Stalinist terror and remaining in the background led to misunderstandings everywhere, in addition to the fact that the law, always thirsty to bring water to its mill, was trying to evade to this circumstance. In this same line or complex harmony, we must read his position concerning Algeria, when he condemned the fact that the National Liberation Front (FLN) had resorted to armed struggle and attacks for defend "just cause" by using "unfair methods". He then pronounced his famous sentence: "At the moment, they are putting bombs on the trams of Algiers. My mother can be in one of these trams. If justice is done, I choose my mother.

When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, he was 44 years old. "Art is not a solitary pleasure. It's a way to thrill as many men as possible, to offer them a special image of common pains and joys, "Camus said in Stockholm in his acceptance speech. It therefore obliges the artist not to isolate himself; Submit yourself to the truth, the most humble and the most universal. And those who have often chosen their destiny as artists because they felt different quickly learn that they will no longer be able to feed their art or their difference more than to confess their resemblance to everyone else. The artist is forged in this perpetual coming and going of himself towards others, at an equal distance from the beauty without which he can not live and from the community from which he can not be detached ". The French writer warned against the work that his generation should do in front of a world threatened with destruction. "We believe that each generation is destined to remake the world. Mine knows however that he can not. But his task may be greater. This is to prevent the world from collapsing. Heir to a corrupt story – in which failed revolutions, foolish techniques, dead gods and exhausted ideologies mingle; in which mediocre powers, which can destroy everything today, do not convince; in which the intelligence humiliates itself to serve hatred and oppression – this generation had, in and around itself, to restore from bitter preoccupations, a little of what constitutes the dignity of living and dying Faced with a world threatened with disintegration, in which our great inquisitors risk to found the empire of death for ever, he knows he should, in a kind of crazy race against time, restore a peace between nations dubious. be that of bondage, reconcile work and culture, and rebuild with all men a new ark of alliance. "

The car "danced the waltz" on a wide road in France, near Villeblevin, a village in Burgundy, at noon on January 4, 1960. Editor-in-chief Michel Gallimard was driving; next to him was Camus. After a few landslides, such as "if something collapsed under the vehicle", the car hit one of the bananas on the road violently, bounced against another, several meters away, to destroy it completely. The French writer died instantly at 47 years old. Jan Zábrana, Czech poet and translator, dissident of the Soviet regime, wrote in his diary in 1980 that the Nobel Prize road accident of literature was organized by Soviet espionage and that the order was given by Foreign Minister Shepilov, an investigation that is revealed in Camus must die (Bärenhaus), from the Italian writer and journalist Giovanni Catelli.

"They say it was raining that day on the other side of the Atlantic, over there in France, on a road lined with bananas on the sides," wrote Ocampo in the leaflet obituary published in the magazine South, in May 1960. "Did the smell of rain accompany him? What would he have thought when he had breathed that smell? What would he have thought at the last moment? (…) How would he feel, did he feel possible death a loss or liberation, or a loss in this liberation, his absence leaves us speechless, so many times our voice was expressed. what we were not right to say like him. "

To write the agenda

Monday 12

* 19h: Opening with Walter Romero, Juan Javier Negri, Raquel Garzon, Alexandre Alajbegovic and Eugenia Zicavo.

* 20 hours: Projection of Away from men, by David Oelhoffen (2014), adaptation of the story "The Guest", with Viggo Mortensen and Reda Kateb. In Malba (Figueroa Alcorta 3415).

Tuesday 13

*19h: Presentation of the book Victoria Ocampo, Albert Camus. Correspondence (1946-1959) with translation and notes by Elisa Mayorga and Juan Javier Negri. Muriel Santa Ana and Diego Manso read letters from Victoria Ocampo and Camus. In the national library (Agüero 2502).

Wednesday 14

*19h: Eliseo Barrionuevo reads fragments of Plague.

* 7:30 pm: Projection of Plague Luis Puenzo with the presence of the director and the film crew. In Malba

Thursday 15

* 19 hours: Oscar Martínez reads L & # 39; abroad.

* 7:30 pm: "The challenge of adaptation L & # 39; abroad of Camus: from the novel to the graphic novel ", interview between Juan Carlos Kreimer and Jacques Ferrandez. Moderator Lucia Vogelfang. At the National Library.

Friday the 16th

* 5.30 pm: Conference "Conservation of modern manuscripts of the National Library of France: the case Camus", by Anais Dupuy-Olivier. At the National Library.

* 19h: Inauguration of the sample Three illustrated interpretations of L & # 39; abroad. On the place of the reader Rayuela of the National Library.

* 7:30 pm: Inauguration of the sample A stranger in Buenos Aires. At the National Library.

Saturday 17

* 15h30: Victoria and Albert. Dialogue between Pablo Dreizik and Victoria Lliendo. Villa Ocampo (Elortondo 1837, Beccar).